Two hundred years ago, on Jan. 11, 1807, Ezra Cornell was born into a Quaker family of very modest means in Westchester Landing, N.Y. The eldest of 11 children, whose father was a potter, Cornell referred to himself as a farmer and mechanic who spent some time in the telegraph industry. That time turned out to be highly lucrative -- Cornell made a fortune. Once it became clear that it was indeed a fortune, Cornell promptly rejected conventional practice and directed much of his wealth to found Cornell University -- a comprehensive and practical institution of higher learning dedicated to all forms of intellectual endeavor.

Cornell had visions of a great public prosperity and a universal fairness, viewing America as a place where technology, wealth and altruism could coalesce to benefit all its inhabitants. He spent much of his life far from his home in Ithaca: walking through the antebellum South, selling plows in Maine, supervising the construction and operation of lines for the telegraph industry and serving as a New York state legislator in Albany. Throughout these endeavors, he wrote long and detailed letters home and kept a diary.

Similarly, as Cornell and Andrew Dickson White conceived and planned Cornell University, their correspondence closely documented the evolution of their dreams and their preparations for the university's opening and operation. Cornell's letters reveal a practical but visionary man whose life both exemplified and shaped 19th-century America. His keen observations provide a contemporary account of the country's cultural development, the profound effects of industrialization and the Civil War and his own role in developing the century's principal communication technology and its most innovative educational experiment.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Cornell's birth -- and to offer an insight into this man and how his visions for Cornell evolved --the Cornell Chronicle will publish a weekly column, The Ezra Files during 2007. It will feature the life and times of Cornell, the man, in the 1800s, largely excerpting from Cornell's correspondence and other material that is posted on the Cornell Library Web site, Invention and Enterprise: Ezra Cornell, a Nineteenth-Century Life, at http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/Ezra-exhibit/entrance.html. Its materials are based primarily on the Ezra Cornell Papers (and its Web site at http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/cornell/guide.htm) in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Cornell Library.

Adapted by Susan S. Lang from Invention and Enterprise: Ezra Cornell, a Nineteenth-Century Life.